Skype - The Thrill is Gone. Or is it? - Unified Communications

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I perhaps added some fuel to a recent Skye debate in a post elsewhere on some of the recent management shakeups at Skype. In adding his own cogent thoughts to the topic, David Beckmeyer quote this from my post:

Skype’s in trouble. Big trouble. They’re proving they aren’t worth the money. Niklas is back at the helm because his feet are being held to the fire monetarily as much as for any other reason. It’s not about owning his baby...
Skype’s in bigger trouble than we know. I think we’ll see more shakeup and trouble at Skype. Soo

I stand by that, and don't see that position changing soon. I think David tends to agree from his closing statement:

Skype is doing okay as a stand-alone business,
but Ebay could have done as well buying a ball-bearing manufacturer if
that's all they wanted (and for a lot less money). At some point, for
this deal to pay off, 2+2 has to equal a lot more then 4, and at this
point, that's not happening. At this point, the main benefit that Ebay
has gotten out of this deal is they prevented anyone else from buying
Skype. But that's a pretty expensive end result, given they spent an
entire year's worth of their net revenue on Skype. They are going to
have to fish or cut bait on this thing, so Ken may very well be right
that we will see more indications of trouble to come.

Today our friends at Skype Journal are back with a new look and past some technical hurdles. Welcome back guys. We really missed you. Jim Courtney says he's going to CES and will be looking for more information on Skype's direction. I look forward to that. I see Skype continuing popularity in consumer circles, and perhaps gaining a little more traction in small businesses. But on the enterprise side, I see the opposite. I don't see Skype surfacing on the radar, but rather, dismissed and blocked. And while they've made some weak overtures to business, they just aren't a factor in enterprise telecommunications space.

That's in part due the firewall bypass, port-hopping, evasion techniques used, in part due to the proprietary encryption with no provision for enterprise managed key escrow, and in part due to the peer-to-peer nature of the Skype solution. I've written in detail several times about the reality that P2P technologies are viewed askance by enterprise networking and security managers. Skype has done nothing to change that view but spread some weak thoughts on using registry entries to manage security. Most enterprises find it far easier and more effective to just implement a NAC solution and block Skype. I see that as a growing trend, and the NAC vendors do too.

Skype is certainly a sustainable business, but they're reapdily becoming justanother phnooe company, and not the one of first choice. Rather than being the disruptors, Skype is embracing the cloak of the target of disruption. I think they have a tough year ahead of them.

Time will tell.